Hedy woke up at 2:12 a.m.. She tiptoed into the kitchen to make herself a bowl of cereal and was upset to find Anna, in her pink robe and fuzzy pink slippers, having cookies and milk in the dark.

"Dave and I had a fight. I think we might be breaking up," offered Anna. She turned her face to Hedy, tears on her lower eyelashes, blotchy pink on her already pink cheeks. Hedy’s anger changed to fear. Hedy didn’t want to be turned to. Anna stuffed an entire soggy cookie in her mouth and began to sob, tears streaming down her fat and moving jowls. Hedy took a step back and grabbed the frame of the door to put between her and Anna. She wanted to dart back to her room and lock herself in, but found herself frightened in place.

"It’ll be okay," Hedy said, because she couldn’t think of anything else. There had been no one to console her when Chris left her last October, saying that she had changed, that he wasn’t in love with the woman she had become. He said that there were people who could help her, professionals, but helping was exactly the problem.


"You’re mad at me, too," wailed Anna, "Aren’t you?"


Hedy counted the steps back to her room but she couldn’t will herself to go.


"Because you never talk to me," Anna continued. "We never hang out. All you ever do is sleep in your room all day. Even on the weekends. You sleep more than anyone I know. And I never see you eat. Not even when I make that pasta dish you like. You know, with the vodka sauce. That’s not healthy, you know. It’s not good to be alone all the time. I worry about you."


"You really don’t have to."


"I know I don’t. That’s what makes us friends."


Hedy stared in wonder as Anna wiped her face with a paper napkin and blew her nose.


"Are you sure you aren’t mad at me?" Anna asked, her round eyes glistening with fresh tears.

Hedy needed some ice to crack, but there was nothing left to pounce on. It was 62 degrees and sunny on her walk to work. Mud had replaced the snow and ice. The flowers were budding. Hedy hated it. Most of all she hated that she had given into Anna and agreed to attend her dinner party. Anna needed a project. Just a little something to cheer her up. Agreeing to be present was the only thing Hedy could do to get away and back to her room.

Hedy’s day didn’t get any better when she arrived at work. She didn’t know that her co-worker Shannon was moving to New York City, and certainly didn’t know that the others had been planning a surprise going away party for Shannon all week. She reasoned that she was only let in on the conspiracy because they needed her to pick up the cake they had ordered from the Wegman’s down the street. And they needed it to be done as discreetly as possible.


Hedy knew this meant her attempts to disappear were working. Shannon would not be suspicious if Hedy was not at her desk for a few hours because she never noticed her anyway. She felt their eyes peering in on her less and less. Well, except for Peter, who looked down at her feet and up at her earlobe as he asked if she would do him this favor. Hedy didn’t like to help or be helped, but she found that she couldn’t say no. And she wanted to get out of his sight before he got a good look at her.


On her way to Wegman’s, Hedy wondered why Shannon was going away. She imagined that Shannon was going to live in a renovated loft in Soho with the Wall Street power broker she met through an online dating service. Or maybe, Shannon was touched by a news report that outlined the desperate state of the nation’s inner city public schools and had decided to teach 7th grade Math at MS 244. Or, maybe she wasn’t going to New York at all. Perhaps the New York story was just an excuse to…go away. To be away. To lock herself in her room, shut out the light, and be gone.


As she stood in line at the deli, Hedy noticed a rack of rotisserie chickens spinning under an orange heat lamp. She watched the birds spin and thought of the field swallow. She remembered the little bones and the sound they made. She watched the birds spin and thought of all the bigger bones it contained, and the sounds she could make.


When Hedy returned to the office, she put out the meat and cheese tray. She took the lid off the cake and blew up the balloons. And while everyone toasted Shannon and wished her luck, Hedy hid in the supply closet with a rotisserie chicken. She didn’t know what to do with the meat so she ate it. She stuffed herself with chicken to get to the bones, to break the bones, to hear the crack, crack.


That night, and for many nights afterward, Hedy walked two miles to the 24-hour Wegmans on Eastman Avenue in the blackness that hung between 2 am and dawn. Hedy passed by the frozen bags of boneless, skinless chicken breasts and headed straight for the rotisserie.Once home, she dug her fingers into the flesh, tearing and discarding the skin, pulling off the meat and placing it in clear plastic containers. Then, with skin and flesh still under her fingernails, she sat down to suck the bones clean, scraping off bits of meat with her two front teeth. She snapped the bones in pieces with her greasy hands. She crushed them between her molars. She took the metal tenderizer from the kitchen drawer and pounded the carcass, listened to it splinter and crack.

•••

By the time Anna’s dinner party came around, Anna and Dave had made up. Hedy hoped this meant she could find an excuse not to attend, but Anna wasn’t letting her off the hook. She sat on her bed in the flowered dress Anna had picked out for her and waited for all the guests to arrive. She thought that if she stayed very quiet, Anna might forget that she was even in there. Yet, when she heard voices asking, "Hey, don’t you have a roommate?" and "Where’s your roommate?" she knew she had to come out of hiding.

Hedy stepped out of her room and into the midst of a dozen or so twenty-somethings, all sipping wine and eating cheese and crackers. "Here she is!" cried Anna, as if Hedy was the woman of honor. Anna grabbed her by the hand and twirled her around the room, introducing her to old high school friends, past and present co-workers, and an old roommate from college.


"So, you’re the roommate!" said some.


"Nice to finally meet you," said others.


Hedy felt dizzy.


"How did you and Anna meet?" a redhead asked Hedy as she slowly shifted her weight from foot to foot in front of the cocktail wieners.


"I just answered her ad for a roommate," Hedy replied, and moved over to the mini-quiche.


"So what do you do?" asked a man wearing an electric blue tie.


"I’m an administrative assistant at Kodak," Hedy answered, and then excused herself to get a glass of wine.


"I think we’ve met before," said a woman holding a bottle of Pinot Grigio. "Did you go to St. John Fisher?


"Oh yeah," chimed in the woman holding the bottle of Shiraz. "I remember you. You were a communications major, right? We had Media Ethics together."


Pinot Grigio girl ganged up on her, "You’re Professor Beale’s daughter! Oh, we were so sorry to hear about the accident."


"Excuse me," Hedy said, and calmly walked to her bedroom and locked the door. She opened the bottom drawer of her dresser and pulled out the 8-pound uncooked turkey she had been forced to buy at Wegman’s last night when they were out of rotisserie chicken. She crouched between her bed and dresser, her pink and white dress hiked above her knees, peeling the slippery skin back, and digging at the blood-wet flesh. With a carving knife she cut loose the meat. She hammered the turkey with the meat tenderizer. She cracked the broken bones with her teeth.


"Hedy!" Anna called from outside her door, "I’m about to serve dinner."


"Coming!" Hedy called back, her mouth full of marrow.

•••

By the time the grass was green again, the chicken and turkey bones were no longer working. Hedy needed something bigger. She entertained the idea of trying to catch the stray cats that wandered around the empty lot behind her building at night. She hung onto the wire fence with a flashlight, studying their movements, setting their eyes to glow green. She knew they would make the loudest crack yet, but they would be too hard to catch.


It was after 4:00 am when it became clear to Hedy that there was only one option left. She had cracked, crushed, and broken everything she possibly could. She had bitten her fingernails down to the quick and bloodied her cuticles in an effort to control her impulse to put a hammer through Anna’s television. As she sat in the blue glow of the television, dreading the dawn, Hedy knew that she had to break her own bones. It was just the crack she needed to put everything back in place. Hedy stayed up and schemed, and when the sun crept through the slats of the window blinds, she triumphantly went skipping to work.